Cellular radio base stations in wireless communication networks are characterized by having more than 100 product properties. As many as 20 of these properties define the radio portion of these base stations. These product properties drive different radio variants, some of which can be addressed by designing the radio to comply with multiple standards and or making the radio programmable. Making the radios programmable or to comply with multiple standards vastly decreases the number of radio variants needed for a base station.
However, several irreducible factors limit the reduction in the number of radio variants needed. These include a number of transmit and receive antennas per sector, which can typically be 1, 2, 4 or 8 transmit antennas, and as many receive antennas. Another factor, is the required transmit power, which, for a base station covering a wide area could be 60 watts to 100 watts or greater. For a medium range base station the required power may be on the order of 6 watts, and for a local area base station may be less than 250 milli-watts. Yet another factor that affects the number of required radio variants is the set of bands of the evolved universal terrestrial radio access (EUTRA) network standard. Also, another factor is whether the radio is used indoors or outdoors. In consideration of these factors, there are about 960 radios needed to cover the complete market space.
With about 960 radios required to cover the complete market space, manufacturers and cellular radio operators are faced with a daunting problem. The manufacturer has the problem of efficiently manufacturing a large number of radio variants and the operator has a problem of radio variant inventory, maintenance and handling. One way to reduce the number of radios required to cover the market space is by increasing the instantaneous bandwidth of each radio to reduce the number of radios needed to cover the EUTRA bands. For example, an instantaneous bandwidth of 400 Mega Hertz (MHz) enables an operator to span all EUTRA bands with only 4 radios. In this case the total number of radios required to span the market space is about 380, still a very large number.
Therefore, there is a need for a radio system architecture that reduces a number of radios required to span the market space in a wireless communication system.